


Denouement

by xSparklingRavenx



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: A2 is here too briefly, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dreams, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-10-06 19:12:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10342743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xSparklingRavenx/pseuds/xSparklingRavenx
Summary: The name hidden behind ‘2B’ was a curse.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've got those fandom posting nerves aggghhhhh I finished the game last night and sobbed my heart out so this was born ;A; Beta-read and edited by myself so if any mistakes slipped through that's on me. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this!

The second time 2B killed 9S, he hadn’t been wearing his visor.

The first time wasn’t difficult. It was quick, easy. 2B hadn’t felt strongly about it because back then it had been nothing more than an inevitable outcome that she knew would eventually come to pass. Partner up with the scanner, and kill him if – when – he found out something he shouldn’t, and the job was done. He hadn’t seen it coming, had no reason to suspect it. She took his head off clean with her sword and it was over.

The second time, he’d removed his visor, and if she could go back to that moment and do anything differently, it’d be this; she’d have stabbed him through before he’d even managed to get his hands near his face.

This was how it went; they were in the city, him walking slightly ahead of her. She’d gotten word from command that recently he’d been digging in files that he shouldn’t have been, but they were unsure of how much he’d discovered. She was to be on guard, be ready at any moment. He came to a stop and looked up at the sky.

“2B?” he said. “I’ve…I’ve got a question. It’s important.”

That should have been enough of a warning sign, but it wasn’t sufficient enough to cut him down on. He’d spun on his heel, dragging his visor from his face. 9S’s eyes were big and blue like a human child’s might have been. Why had they made the scanner types so young looking?

“What is it?” 2B said. She made eye contact, even if he couldn’t tell. “Make it quick. We’ve got a mission to fulfil.”

“I know.” he hesitated, the visor clenched tight in his fist. He knew something. He knew. “Just…what would you think? If it turned out everything we were doing was for nothing?”

The first time they had done this dance, she had barely known him. By the second, she had grown to enjoy his company, his curious comments, his emotional response to the world around him. She knew him in a way he didn’t know her. She’d had two of his short lifetimes to get to know him.

She didn’t want to press him, but her programming required it of her. “What are you talking about, 9S?”

“I need to tell someone. I need to…” he glanced away from her. “I found some stuff out, and it wasn’t just anything. Everything we’ve been told 2B, it’s a—!”

2B ran at him before he could comprehend the situation at hand. Scanner types weren’t made for battle, and behind her cover she was an E-model created for killing other YoRHa androids. She tackled him to the ground.

She should have gone for the same kill as before, fast and clean, but she couldn’t bear to do that to him again. “2B!” he gasped, struggling beneath her. She was heavier than he was, stronger than he was, and her programming was more advanced than his was when it came to combat. “2B, what are you doing!”

For a moment she was paralysed by the fear in his eyes. He began to shout something out about the logic virus and how it must have broken down her IFF but she couldn’t really hear him. He fought to get free, and then she felt him there, in her own mind.

He was trying to hack her.

This was crueller than a quick, unseen death. Coming back to her senses, she took Virtuous Contract in hand and drove it straight through his chest.

9S screamed. 2B slammed her eyes shut so she didn’t have to watch, but she couldn’t turn off her hearing. Idiot, she told herself. She could have made it so easy. She could have spared him this.

He’d taken too long to die. It had been a lesson, a warning. Trying to be merciful to her own feelings had made it worse for the both of them. She would never do that to him again. When he was reintroduced to her, his memory wiped clean, she could barely look at him, but he seemed so happy to meet her.

The name hidden behind ‘2B’ was a curse.

9S was always lonely. He loved having a friend, having someone who would answer his questions or just to talk at. She stopped initiating conversation with him in the hopes that it would put some kind of wedge between them. Getting attached was killing her.

“Hey, 2B,” he said to her, the fifth time they met. “People close to me call me Nines, so I was wondering if you might want to call me Nines too?”

2B, fool she was, said yes. And when she killed him that time she held his body close and sobbed that name into his hair. They met again, they travelled together doing recon on the enemy, he asked her to call him Nines, she declined. He seemed taken aback by that, but he didn’t push it.

She had to watch her tongue lest she slip. 

\--

Time went on. 2B’s memory was cruel to her. It always came back to the second time, replaying the way his eyes went wide with fear every time she closed her own to rest. Androids dreamt; 2B just happened to dream of death. All the ways she had killed him, all the ways she could kill him, all the ways she would kill him again and again.

She wondered if he dreamt the same. Impossible. He didn’t know, he never would until the moment when it was all too late and she ripped life from him like tearing a human heart from a chest. It was never easy anymore. It didn’t leave her feeling fulfilled, like she’d done what she was meant to do. It just left her cold.

2B began to dread every time 9S opened his mouth to speak in case he let her know something that would doom him. His endearing questions became less charming and more fear-inducing. Every time he asked her something, was he coming closer to the truth? Every time he pressed a topic, was he treading on ice that would no doubt crack beneath him?

He advanced, took up a weapon in hand, figured her out sometimes before she even had a chance to launch her own attack. Her earlier fears that he may remember returned. On some level, she thought, he must know. Even with his memories wiped away like ink from glass, there was some part of him that knew. “I’m sorry.” she wanted to say, but there was never any opportunity to say it.

In 11945, three years after he was deployed for the first time, two and a half after she looked him in his fearful eyes as she pinned him down, she wondered what she felt towards him. She wasn’t human and didn’t pretend she was, but her feelings towards him were deeper and more complex than they had any right to be. She had seen 6O chase after other androids to no abound, had seen B units and D units forming relationships, but there was something different with what she shared with 9S. She was his executioner, she could never be anything else towards him.

Deployed again. She slept in the desert with 9S by her side as they traversed the sands. Dreaming of the death, she wanted nothing more than an end to the killing.

Please, she thought. Don’t go digging. Don’t find anything. Don’t make me kill you again. Don’t put me through all of this anew.

Was it selfish? If it was, she didn’t care.

For months they travelled the surface, collecting information and destroying machines. He could fight now, and he took pleasure in it. Machines that cried out they were scared meant nothing to either of them, but there was something about the way he threw his sword straight through them that hit too close to home.

His eyes had been so frightened. Even though he hadn’t had the time to say that he’d been scared as she pinned him down, it had been evident.

When the Commander called to tell her to be on guard, that they had reason to believe that 9S had obtained classified information, she wanted to run herself through with her own sword. Her programming would never allow it. She had a purpose to fulfil whether she wanted to or not.

He came to a stop in the city, near enough the same place he had pulled his visor from his face the second time she’d killed him. “2B?” he said. 

Her proverbial heart sunk. She started pleading with someone, anyone, that he wasn’t about to say what she thought he was about to say. “What?”

Toeing the ground, he fumbled for words. “I have a confession to make.”

She started to reach for her sword. Everything they had built up this time was about to be razed to the ground. “Does it really need to be now?” she said, quietly hoping he would put it to rest.

“No! I mean.” he paused, sighing. “Well, I’ve been thinking and I just wanted to kind of put it out there and say that I’m really glad that I met you, you know? Like you’re kind of stuffy sometimes but it gets really lonely for scanner types like me, and you’re the best battler type I’ve ever met. So…is that weird? I just wanted to tell you.”

She dropped her hand back to her side, a sigh of relief in her throat. “Nines,” she breathed, a smile on her lips. “That’s…emotions are prohibited, you know.”

He seemed perplexed all of a sudden. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, it was in the tilt of his head. “Nines?” he said. “Did you hear that from someone on the base?”

Shit. He hadn’t said about his nickname to her yet. She was about to back peddle when he shook his head. “Never mind. It’s just. I wanted to tell you because…I found something out, 2B. And it’s bad. Really bad.”

In a second she had Virtuous Treaty in her hand and before she could register what she was doing it was shoved through his chest. Unlike the second time where he had looked into her eyes and panicked, she had struck through most of his vital systems. This would be quick.

9S didn’t scream, not this time. He staggered, his balance lost, but the sword kept him upright. When he tried to speak, red fluid leaked from his mouth. It wasn’t blood, but it looked close enough. Too close.

“2B,” he said, his voice splintered like shards of glass. “You could just stop.”

There was no stopping. Not for her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

\--

In retrospect, the moment with their black boxes in the factory was the beginning of the end even if she hadn’t been aware of it at the time. She should’ve known it would be different this time when 9S nearly died for her. She should’ve known it would be different when they’d chosen to die together instead of her being the one to kill him again.

And yet he was still beneath her hands, still dying. When she dug her fingers into his throat, he closed his eyes instead of looking up at her. “It always ends like this.” she said, because it did.

And then it didn’t. He lived.

When the logic virus took her, after she had sent 9S away to keep him safe, when she found A2 outside the facility, she knew it was over. There was no way to save her, with the bunker gone and the virus so far progressed inside her. 

It was difficult to think. It was difficult to do much at all, yet she cut the visor from her face. She wanted to look A2 in the eye as she died, to know the future had been left in good hands. 

A2 was silent. She didn’t seem the type to say much. She took Virtuous Contract in hand and regarded her for a moment, calm and collected. No wonder E types had been built from her and the rest of their squad. They knew, 2B realised, how to kill.

She didn’t make a sound as A2 stabbed her through. Instead, relief flooded through her, lifting the weight from her shoulders. It was over. Everything was over. She hoped 9S would find the message she left.

“2B! Are you—!”

She heard the words distantly. She knew that voice. With everything she had left, she turned her head. 9S stood on the bridge, just close enough to see. It was getting harder to see. Her systems were shutting down.

“Oh…Nines…” she breathed, her tone light even as fluid seeped from her chest. The nickname felt right. Here, as she died, she was free to show her affection, and he was free of her. She would never hurt him again.

2B fell from the sword. This was her retribution.

**Author's Note:**

> Does 2B know humanity is extinct? It's the one thing I'm not sure on because she must know something is amiss to know that 9S is finding out things that he shouldn't...I kept it vague intentionally on that part, so I hope that's okay!


End file.
